My system has about 22 backups of my LR spanning from 01-12 to 07-12. I really haven't made that many changes to my images in that time span.

Can I delete about half of those backups and not any problems.

Also, I have a LR3 catalog taking up space on my drive, can that be deleted of do I need it?

The reason for this is I'm running low on drive space on my laptop so I'm trying to get rid of duplicate files. I'll still save a copy to my backup, I just want it off my laptop HD if possible without causing problems.

I know HD space is cheap now and I do backup ALL my stuff to external drives but I still like having things organized and I like to minimize duplicate stuff when possible.

Thanks

Yes. Backups are backups. You don't need to keep them all… just a couple. How often do you have Lightroom backing up? I set it to weekly, and honestly I have a script (well, actually, a program called Hazel) which automatically deletes backups that are more than a month old, so I'm covered.

thanks guys

Since I create a different LRCAT for every job I do, (except for repeat commercial clients) ...I just have an LRCAT archive folder on an external drive. A single LRCAT catalog for each job goes in that folder, and then each job with all it's individual LRCAT backups gets dumped onto duplicate externals for long-term storage.

Sometimes I delete the preview folders since those can get kinda fat, but the LRCAT file itself is pretty darn small most of the time so I've never felt a need to delete them in a long-term archive situation...

=Matt=

Originally Posted by Matthew Saville Since I create a different LRCAT for every job I do, (except for repeat commercial clients) ...I just have an LRCAT archive folder on an external drive. A single LRCAT catalog for each job goes in that folder, and then each job with all it's individual LRCAT backups gets dumped onto duplicate externals for long-term storage. Sometimes I delete the preview folders since those can get kinda fat, but the LRCAT file itself is pretty darn small most of the time so I've never felt a need to delete them in a long-term archive situation... =Matt=

Yuck. This totally gets rid of all of Lightroom's asset management functionality. To each his own I guess

Originally Posted by CatOne Yuck. This totally gets rid of all of Lightroom's asset management functionality. To each his own I guess

In my line of work, it would be INSANE to try and collect even a single month's work in the same catalog, let alone an entire year. (The studio captures 10-15K images per week during peak season.)

Especially with multiple post-production staff working on multiple machines, it just makes sense to create a separate catalog for each job. That way you minimize risk of loss, while maximizing the productivity of multiple people working at once.

=Matt=